I highly doubt that that expectation is due to hidden belief in gods. It sounds more like an overly strong generalization from “it all adds up to normality” to me.
In other words, you can expect the future to turn out alright without any agents actively making it so based purely on inductive bias.
I really think the “You’re just as likely to get results in the opposite direction” argument is on the priors overstated for most forms of research. Does Scott think that work we do today is just as likely to decrease our understanding of P/NP as increase it?
My own interpretation of Scott’s words here is that it’s unclear whether your research is actually helping in the “get Friendly AI before some idiot creates a powerful Unfriendly one” challenge. Fundamental progress in AI in general could just as easily benefit the fool trying to build a AGI without too much concern for Friendliness, as it could benefit you. Thus, whether fundamental research helps out avoiding the UFAI catastrophy is unclear.
Okay, those with a two-boxing agent type don’t win but the two-boxer isn’t talking about agent types. They’re talking about decisions. So they are interested in what aspects of the agent’s winning can be attributed to their decision and they say that we can attribute the agent’s winning to their decision if this is caused by their decision. This strikes me as quite a reasonable way to apportion the credit for various parts of the winning.
Do I understand it correctly that you’re trying to evaluate the merits of a decision (to two-box) in isolation of the decision procedure that produced it? Because that’s simply incoherent if the payoffs of the decision depend on your decision procedure.
If a text can have Unfortunate Implications even if there was no alternative way to tell the story and the story is legitimate, then I don’t understand this concept of Unfortunate Implications and I think it oughtn’t to be called “Unfortunate Implications”. Because there is no implication of anything.
That sounds a lot like Conservation of Expected Evidence to me, by analogy if not quite literally.
Prediction: by the end of the story, Harry will somehow have managed to dispell the Interdict of Merlin. Given his opinions on muggle society that gains power with each generation, versus wizard society that loses power with each generation, there is no way Harry is going to let that stand. Given that it was brought about by magic, presumably it can be cancelled by magic, and Harry will find a way.
In canon, the assignment of eligible hearers to prophecies is done by Minesty workers. Specifically, the judgment that “the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord” refers to Harry, and thus that Harry should have access to the prophecy, was made some time after the recording of the prophecy, by a human. On the assumption that things work the same in the rational-verse, the fact that Lily and James could hear the prophecy isn’t evidence of anything other than the interpretation of the Minestry worker who handled the case.
A piece of evidence in favour of this idea is that Harry, in spite of Dumbledore’s warnings, has tried to interpret the prophecy and arrived at almost exactly the canon interpretation on his first try. With dramatic convention regarding the interpretation of prophecies demanding that Harry’s interpretation is completely wrong, this lends credibility to the Dark Lord Death hypothesis.
In particular, I wish I had been more explicit about the central probability-theoretic point: the fact that the evidence against Guede screens off Kercher’s death as evidence against Knox and Sollecito.
I think this insight warrants a great amount of emphasis. The fact that Kercher’s death is screened off by some factor unrelated to Knox and Sollecito means that the question of whether the given evidence against Knox and Sollecito is sufficient to judge them co-conspirators is equivalent to the question of whether the given evidence against them would have been sufficient to judge them murder-conspirators in the absence of a body. And I don’t think anyone believes THAT is the case.
To figure out a strange plot, look at what happens, then ask who benefits. Except that Dumbledore didn’t plan on you trying to save Granger at her trial, he tried to stop you from doing that. What would’ve happened if Granger had gone to Azkaban? House Malfoy and House Potter would’ve hated each other forever. Of all the suspects, the only one who wants that is Dumbledore. So it fits. It all fits. The one who really committed the murder is—Albus Dumbledore!
I think if you use this line of reasoning and then allow yourself to dismiss arbitrary parts of it as “not part of the plan”, you can make a convincing argument for almost anything. For that reason, I consider the entire theory suspect.
Taken to completion.
The Cryonics Status question really needs an “other” answer. There are more possible statuses one can be in than the ones given; in particular there are more possible “I’d want to, but...” answers.
Taking the survey IS posting something insightful.
My own definition—proto-science is something put forward by someone who knows the scientific orthodoxy in the field, suggesting that some idea might be true. Pseudo-science is something put forward by someone who doesn’t know the scientific orthodoxy, asserting that something is true.
This seems like an excellent heuristic to me (and probably one of the key heuristics people actually use for making the distinction), not not valid as an actual definition. For example, Sir Roger Penrose’s quantum consciousness is something I would classify as pseudoscience without a second thought, despite the fact that Penrose as a physicist should know and understand the orthodoxy of physics perfectly well.
Trust—the quintessential element of your so-called “tell culture”—and vulnerability are two sides of the same coin.
That’s true in general. In network security circles, a trusted party is one with the explicit ability to compromise you, and that’s really the operational meaning of the term in any context.
Passphrase: eponymous haha_nice_try_CHEATER
Well played :)
I already knew it, but this post made me understand it.
Even with measurements in hand, old habits are hard to shake. It’s easy to fall in love with numbers that seem to agree with you. It’s just as easy to grope for reasons to write off numbers that violate your expectations. Those are both bad, common biases. Don’t just look for evidence to confirm your theory. Test for things your theory predicts should never happen. If the theory is correct, it should easily survive the evidential crossfire of positive and negative tests. If it’s not you’ll find out that much quicker. Being wrong efficiently is what science is all about.
-- Carlos Bueno, Mature Optimization, pg. 14. Emphasis mine.
Group selectionism alert. The “we are optimized for effectively playing the iterated prisoner’s dilemma” argument, AKA “people will remember you being a jackass”, sounds much more plausible.
“Worst case analysis” is a standard term of art in computer science, that shows up as early as second-semester programming, and Eliezer will be better understood if he uses the standard term in the standard way.
Actually, in the context of randomized algorithms, I’ve always seen the term “worst case running time” refer to Oscar’s case 6, and “worst-case expected running time”—often somewhat misleadingly simplified to “expected running time”—refer to Oscar’s case 2.
A computer scientist would not describe the “omega” case as random—if the input is correlated with the random number source in a way that is detectable by the algorithm, they’re by definition not random.
A system that reliably behaves like the omega case is clearly not random. However, a random system such as case 2 may still occasionally behave like omega, with probability epsilon, and it is not at all unreasonable or uncommon to require your algorithm to work efficiently even in those rare cases. Thus, one might optimize a random system by modelling it as an omega system, and demanding that it works well enough even in that context.
As a point of interest, I want to note that behaving like an illiterate immature moron is a common tactic for (usually banned) video game automation bots when faced with a moderator who is onto you, for exactly the same reason used here—if you act like someone who just can’t communicate effectively, it’s really hard for others to reliably distinguish between you and a genuine foreign 13-year-old who barely speaks English.
Nihil supernum.